Yes: System may lose its pre-eminence within five years

For every dollar California invests in research and development at UC, the faculty bring in an additional $3.89 of private and federal research money. Businesses spun off from basic UC research, lives saved through medical breakthroughs pioneered by UC faculty, technology that began in our laboratories — all these social benefits flow directly and indirectly from research at UC. The university will have contributed as much as $5.2 billion in productivity gains alone to the California economy between 2002 and 2011.

All this is at risk. So how can we avoid a dire future? We have two basic options: bring in more out-of-state money, perhaps by allowing Berkeley, UCLA, and UCSD to admit a larger fraction of out-of state students as undergraduates, charging them market-rate tuition. Or recognize that the state is no longer providing the money for a 10-campus research university system and act accordingly. That is controversial. It makes explicit the need to treat campuses unequally. It would mean supporting the three most successful campuses, ones that educate 50 percent of UC students — Berkeley, UCLA and UCSD — on the more expensive research university model. Other UC campuses — Santa Cruz, Riverside, Merced — provide a fine undergraduate education to some of California's brightest high school students and should make that their primary mission. There is another, even less desirable alternative, but one preferable, in my view, to watching as the entire system is dragged into mediocrity: if all else fails, the system may have to consider closing one or more campuses. That is a horrible thing to contemplate. But better than death by a thousand cuts. Institutions that avoid hard choices as resources shrink end up like General Motors. Our state will be infinitely the poorer, literally and figuratively, if it lets great institutions like Berkeley, UCLA, and UCSD become pale shadows of what they once were.

Scull is distinguished professor and chairman of the sociology department at UCSD, where he has taught for more than three decades. Prior to that, he held faculty appointments at the University of Pennsylvania and at Princeton University.